John G. Whittier.
TO MRS. J. T. FIELDS.
Beverly, June 21, 1866.
Dear Annie,—Here I am once more by the salt sea, and out of the beautiful retreat of the Shakers, where we said “Good-by.”
“Aunt Mary” told me I might come again, and if it were not for the vision of that great dining-room, and the “two settings” of brethren and sisters, and the general wash-basin, I should almost be tempted to go also, and steep myself in that great quietness: only one would need a book now and then, and literature seems to be tabooed among them.
Mr. Whittier was much interested to hear of our adventures. I think I must have been eloquent about cider, for he said, “I wish I had some of it this minute,” so earnestly that I wished I had my hand upon that invisible Shaker barrel....
TO MRS. CELIA THAXTER.
Beverly, July 16, 1867.
My dear Friend,—To think that yesterday I was among the Enchanted Isles, and to-day here, with only the warm murmur of the west wind among the elms! The glory of the day and the far eastern sea lingers with me yet. How I do thank you for those three bright days! The undercurrent of memory would have been too much but for your kindness.
I think I kept it well covered, but there was a vast unrest in me, all those days. I seemed to myself wandering over the turfy slopes, and the rocks, and the sea, in search of a dream, a sweet, impalpable presence that ever eluded me. I never knew how fully dear Lizzie[6] filled my heart, until she was gone. Is it always so? But that Island is Lizzie to me, now. It was the refuge of her dreams, when she could not be there in reality. Her whole being seemed to blossom out into the immense spaces of the sea. I am glad that I have been there once again, and with only the dear brother, and you whom she loved and admired so much. For you are an enchantress. It is a great gift to attract and to hold as you can, and rare, even among women. To some it is a snare, but I do not believe it ever can be to you, because the large generosity of the sea was born into you. How can you help it, if your waves overblow with music, and all sorts of mysterious wealth upon others of us humans? I hope you beguiled our friend into a stay of more than the one day he spoke of. It was doing him so much good to be there, in that free and easy way; just the life he ought to lead for half the year, at least. I shall always use my meagre arts most earnestly to get him to the Island when you are there. There is such a difference in human atmospheres, you know; the petty, east-wind blighted inhabitants of towns are not good for the health of such as he. I esteem it one of the wonderful blessings of my life that he does not feel uncomfortable when I am about. With you, there is the added element of exhilaration, the rarest thing to receive, as one gets into years.
It is a sacred trust, the friendship of such a man.
TO MISS JEAN INGELOW.
Beverly, Mass., December 15, 1867.
My dear Miss Ingelow,—It was very kind of you to write to me, and I can hardly tell you how much pleasure your letter gave me, in my at present lonely and unsettled life. I think a woman’s life is necessarily lonely, if unsettled: the home-instinct lies so deep in us. But I have never had a real home since I was a little child. I have married sisters, with whom I stay, when my work allows it, but that is not like one’s own place. I want a corner exclusively mine, in which to spin my own web and ravel it again, if I wish.
I wish I could learn to think my own thoughts in the thick of other people’s lives, but I never could, and I am too old to begin now. However, there are compensations in all things, and I would not be out of reach of the happy children’s voices, which echo round me, although they will break in upon me rather suddenly, sometimes.
You asked about the sea,—our sea. The coast here is not remarkable. Just here there is a deep, sunny harbor, that sheltered the second company of the Pilgrim settlers from the Mother-Country, more than two centuries ago. A little river, which has leave to be such only at the return of the tide, half clasps the town in its crooked arm, and makes many an opening of beauty twice a day, among the fields and under the hills. The harbor is so shut in by islands, it has the effect of a lake; and the tide comes up over the wide, weedy flats, with a gentle and gradual flow. There are never any dangerous “High Tides” here. But up the shore a mile or two, the islands drift away, and the sea opens gradually as we near the storm-beaten point of Cape Ann, where we can see nothing but the waves and the ships, between us and Great Britain. The granite cliffs grow higher towards the Cape, but their hollows are relieved by little thickets of intensely red wild roses, and later, by the purple twinkling asters and the golden-rod’s embodied sunshine.
The east wind is bitter upon our coast. The wild rocks along the Cape are strewn with memories of shipwreck. Perhaps you remember Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus.” The “Reef of Norman’s Woe” is at Cape Ann, ten miles or so from here. About the same distance out, there is a group of islands,—the Isles of Shoals, which are a favorite resort in the summer, and getting to be somewhat too fashionable, for their charm is the wildness which they reveal and allow. Dressed up people spoil nature, somehow; unintentionally, I suppose; but the human butterflies are better in their own parterres. At Appledore, one of the larger of these islands, I have spent many happy days with the sister of our poet Whittier, now passed to the eternal shores,—and the last summer was there again, without her, alas! I missed her so, even though her noble brother was there! Perhaps that only recalled the lost, lovely days too vividly. I have seldom loved any one as I loved her.
These islands are full of strange gorges and caverns, haunted with stories of pirate and ghost. The old-world romance seems to have floated to them. And there I first saw your English pimpernel. It came here with the Pilgrims, I suppose, as it is not a native. It is pleasant to meet with these emigrant flowers. Most of them are carefully tended in gardens, but some are healthily naturalized in the bleakest spots. I should so like to see the daisies—Chaucer’s daisies—in their native fields; and the “yellow primrose,” too. Neither of these grows readily in our gardens. I have seen them only as petted house-plants.
I recognize some of our wild flowers in your “Songs of Seven.” By the way, Mr. Niles has sent me an illustrated copy of it, and what a gem it is! But I hardly know what are especially ours. Have you the tiny blue four-petaled “Houstonia Cærulia”?—our first flower of spring, that and the rock-saxifrage! And is October in England gladdened with the heavenly azure of the fringed gentian? And does the climbing bitter-sweet hang its orange-colored fruit high in the deep green of the pine-trees, in the autumn? The most wonderful climber I ever saw was the trumpet-vine of the West. It grew on the banks of the Mississippi, climbing to the top of immense primeval trees, bursting out, there, into great red, clarion-like flowers. It seems literally to fix a foot in the trees as it climbs,—and it has an uncivilized way of pulling the shingles off the roofs of the houses over which it is trained. I am glad that violets are common property in the world. The prairies are blue with them. How at home they used to make me feel! for they are New England blossoms too.
I wonder if you like the mountains as well as you do the sea. I am afraid I do, and better, even. It seems half disloyal to say so, for I was born here; to me there is rest and strength, and aspiration and exultation, among the mountains. They are nearly a day’s journey from us—the White Mountains—but I will go, and get a glimpse and a breath of their glory, once a year, always. I was at Winnipiseogee, a mountain-girdled lake, in New Hampshire, when I saw your handwriting, first,—in a letter which told of your having been in Switzerland. We have no sky-cleaving Alps,—there is a massiveness, a breadth, about the hill scenery here, quite unlike them, I fancy. But such cascades, such streams as rise in the hard granite, pure as liquid diamonds, and with a clear little thread of music!
I usually stop at a village on the banks of the Pemigewasset, a small silvery river that flows from the Notch Mountains,—a noble pile, that hangs like a dream, and flits like one too, in the cloudy air, as you follow the stream’s winding up to the Flume, which is a strange grotto, cut sharply down hundreds of feet through a mountain’s heart; an immense boulder was lodged in the cleft when it was riven, half way down, and there it forever hangs, over the singing stream. The sundered rocks are dark with pines, and I never saw anything lovelier than the green light with which the grotto is flooded by the afternoon sun. But I must not go on about the mountains, or I shall never stop,—I want to say something about our poets, but I will not do that, either.
Beauty drifts to us from the mother-land, across the sea, in argosies of poetry. How rich we are with Old England’s wealth! Our own lies yet somewhat in the ore, but I think we have the genuine metal.
How true it is, as you say, that we can never utter the best that is in us, poets or not. And the great true voices are so, not so much because they can speak for themselves, but because they are the voices of our common humanity.
The poets are but leaders in the chorus of souls—they utter our pæans and our misereres, and so we feel that they belong to us. It is indeed a divine gift, the power of drawing hearts upward through the magic of a song; and the anointed ones must receive their chrism with a holy humility. They receive but to give again,—“more blessed” so. And they may also receive the gratitude of those they bless, to give it back to God.
I hope you will write to me again some time, though I am afraid I ought not to expect it. I know what it is to have the day too short for the occupations which must fill it,—to say nothing of what might, very pleasantly, too.
But I shall always be sincerely and gratefully yours,
Lucy Larcom.
TO J. G. WHITTIER.
Beverly, February 28, 1868.
My dear Friend,—Nothing would be pleasanter to me than a visit to Amesbury, and the cold weather is no especial drawback. But I cannot be away from Beverly now, my mother is so ill. She has been suffering very much all winter, but is now nearly helpless, and I think she is rapidly failing. She has an experienced nurse with her, and there is little that any of us can do for her, except to look in now and then, and let her know that her children are not far away. That seems to be her principal earthly comfort. The coming rest is very welcome to her. She lies peacefully hoping for it, and she has suffered, and still does, such intense pain, I cannot feel as I otherwise would about her leaving us. But the rending of these familiar ties is always very hard to bear. She has been a good, kind mother to me, and it is saddest of all to see her suffer without the power of relief; to know that death only can end her pain.
I think of you often, and wish I could sit down for an evening by the light of your cheery wood fire, and have one of the old-time chats. I am so glad that A—— is there, to make it home-like. I think my most delightful remembrances of Amesbury are of that fireside, and the faces gathered about it, upon which the soft flow of the flames flickered and kindled, with the playful and varying interchange of thought. Last Sunday night I spent at Harriet Pitman’s. Cold enough it was, too. But the greenhouse is a small edition of the tropics, and full of blossoms and sweet odors. I should want to live in it, if I were there.
I do not know what to make of the aspect of things at Washington. It cannot be that we shall be left to plunge into another war, and yet we may need it. I do not see that our terrible struggle made the deep impression it should in establishing national principles. Only apathy to the most vital interests could have brought us to this pass. It seems as if A. J. must show himself an absolute fiend, before his removal is insisted upon.
Miss Larcom’s mother died March 14, 1868. The bereavement was great; but the long illness had prepared her daughter for the affliction. Years afterwards she used to say that when in trouble or despondency, like a child she wanted to cry out for her mother.
CHAPTER VIII.
WRITINGS AND LETTERS.
1868-1880.
Though Miss Larcom’s formal connection with school life ended when she left Norton, she continued to deliver occasional, and sometimes weekly, lectures at different schools, on topics illustrating English literature. In 1867, and at intervals for years after, at the Ipswich Academy, at Wheaton, at Dr. Gannett’s school, and at Bradford Academy, the students never forgot her addresses on “Criticism,” “Elizabethan Poetry,” “The Drama,” and “Sidney’s ‘Arcadia.’”
In spite of the fact that she received a fair salary from “Our Young Folks,” and added to her resources by teaching and by printing poems in the magazines, it was necessary for her to practice economy. With the intention of being careful in her expenditures, she took rooms in Boston, purchasing and cooking her own food. She alluded to the plan thus: “In my housekeeping plan, I am going to carry out a pet notion. People generally prefer indigestible food, I find; at least, I cannot often get what I can digest. So I am going to teach myself to make unleavened bread, and all sorts of coarse-grained eatables, and these, with figs and dates, and baked apples, and a little meat now and then, will keep me in clover.” Her friends, hearing of the way in which she “caricatured housekeeping,” sent her boxes full of good things. It was with the pleasure of a school girl receiving a Thanksgiving box, that she acknowledged the receipt of eggs, cranberries, apples, and “such exquisitely sweet butter.” She proved that with very little expense one can be happy, if the spirit is cheerful. This incident is an illustration of a lifetime of economical living.